Keynote speakers
Day 1 (Wed 23)
- Nina Kazanina (University of Geneva, web)
- presenting: “Relational organisation advantage: perception and memory for relations in language and vision.”
What is the format of knowledge representations in long-term memory? I will discuss the critical yet often overlooked role of predicates, including relations, in perception and memory. I will present findings from a series of EEG experiments showing that relations are automatically and spontaneously extracted from visual and verbal input. I will also show that relations enhance memory for both visual and verbal information and discuss the implications for the organisation of semantic memory. Finally, I will consider how predicates may be implemented in neurobiology.
Day 2 (Thu 24)
- Evan Kidd (Australian National University, web)
- presenting: “Language acquisition in crosslinguistic perspective.”
Child language acquisition has a long history of crosslinguistic research. However, as with most subfields of cognitive science, the field is some way from representative coverage of the languages of the world. Our studies show a skewed focus on English and other Indo-European languages and fewer studies of acquisition in even the largest language families (e.g., Niger-Congo, Austronesian). In this talk I will discuss language coverage in child language acquisition research. I will then review recent work by my colleagues and I on typologically diverse languages. Using both corpus and experimental studies, I show that work on understudied languages both widens our knowledge of the conditions and contexts in which children acquire language and challenges existing theory built upon a skewed evidential base. I end with some concrete recommendations on how we can continue to collate and expand the evidential base.
Day 3 (Fri 25)
- Julia Krebs (University of Salzburg, web)
- presenting: “Grammar in space and time: What sign languages reveal about language modality, processing and experience.”
Sign languages are expressed within the three-dimensional signing space through the interplay of manual components — the shape, location, orientation, and movement of the hands and arms — and non-manual components such as facial expressions and body posture. Unlike the spontaneous gestures produced by hearing non-signers, sign language structures are grammatically licensed and linguistically structured, requiring formal acquisition in both first and second language contexts. Naïve observers may perceive certain (parts of) signs as resembling familiar gestures or facial expressions from everyday hearing communication. Yet despite this surface similarity, such forms in sign languages are not gestural: their spatial and temporal precision is linguistically constrained, encoding systematic distinctions in meaning that must be learned through language exposure. This talk focuses on the linguistic structure of visually motivated sign language constructions, with particular attention to how spatially and temporally precise movement of the hands and arms, as well as the shape, orientation, and location of the hands, express fine-grained meaning contrasts. Drawing on experimental evidence, it is further shown that the degree of language experience fundamentally shapes how these constructions are processed.